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The week’s top news on freedom of expression, journalists in danger, artists in exile, and banned literature. Featured this week: Banned Books Week, PEN International passes resolution on Tibet, Chile investigates Pablo Neruda’s death, and jailed Pussy Riot member on hunger strike.

Tarik Günersel discusses the significance of Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta’s appearance at this year’s PEN International Congress, held in Iceland September 9-12, which coincided with the 40th anniversary of the military coup in Chile, September 11, 1973.

In recognition of Banned Books Week, Sampsonia Way presents a selection of exclusive interviews, excerpts, and profiles of the banned writers who have appeared in our pages – from imprisoned Chinese activists to American poets.

In the wake of a recent wave of arrests aimed to smother free speech in China, Tienchi Martin-Liao examines the laws most frequently used to charge dissidents and influential social media voices, and how they’ve been modified to include new offenses.

Fiction and reality blur on a crumbling internet. “S was lost in his fury. He realized that his old friends, with whom he had shared revolutionary ambitions and hopes in these online communities, had passed into exile, outside the realm of Java, Twitter, and Facebook.”

Lizabel Mónica is a writer whose experimental concepts alternate with narrative texts of high precision and transparency, where a certain pervert urge of her characters is always the result of corporal repression in human behavior. She is a writer of fiction, editor and art critic.

Egyptian writer and columnist Hamdy El-Gazzar talks about writing a novel, specifically his novel Secret Pleasures, as a way to discus what is “happening and happened in Egypt since the Kefaya movement appeared in 2004.”

Egyptian writer and columnist Hamdy El-Gazzar talks about writing a novel, specifically his novel Secret Pleasures, as a way to discus what is “happening and happened in Egypt since the Kefaya movement appeared in 2004.”

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About Sampsonia Way

Sampsonia Way is an online magazine sponsored by City of Asylum/Pittsburgh that seeks to protect and advocate for writers who may be endangered, to educate the public about threats to writers and literary expression, and to create a community in which endangered writers thrive and literary culture is a valued part of life.